Web App Summit: Learning from Social Web Applications

At the UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, Joshua Porter walked through what designers can learn from the success of Social Web Applications:

Most people tend to focus on visual design when evaluating the quality of Web sites. However, several highly successful Web sites (My Space, Craig’s List, & Amazon) are not designed well from a visual or interaction design perspective.

These sites, while lacking in visual & interaction design, have great social design.

When conducting a large-scale e-commerce study, UIE found that users often went to amazon.com before buying something on another e-commerce site to research their purchases. They called this the “Amazon Effect”.

The content people used on Amazon was highly social: user reviews, recommendations, user-generated shopping lists, and more. In fact, Amazon had 11 social features on each & every product page.

Sites with good social design model the social lives, goals, and interactions of their users.

Design Elements: the lowest-level building blocks of design that can be used to form higher-level structures.